[pnews-news] Linkage of Israel and USA

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Received this from:
Arlene & Peter <ar_phte@xxxxxxx>


http://csmonitor.com/2006/0406/dailyUpdate.html


Terrorism & Security
posted April 6, 2006 at 12:54 p.m.

       More debate over report on Israel's influence in US

       Supporters cite freedom of speech, need to discuss topic. Detractors 
say it promotes 'crass bigotry.'

       By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

       Coverage of the debate over the recent paper by professors Stephen 
Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago that 
examines the influence of Israel and its supporters in Washington over US 
foreign policy has been, mostly, absent from US media. But the paper 
generated vigorous debate in the British and international media and on 
the Internet. Since the working paper's release, there have been several 
more attacks on it, but also more support for the professors' position on 
the need to look hard at the US-Israel relationship.
       The Financial Times reports on Wednesday that Harvard Law School's 
Alan Dershowitz posted a 15,000-word response to the Walt-Mearsheimer 
paper on the Kennedy School of Government site, where the original report 
appeared. In his response to the paper, Professor Dershowitz denounced the 
work of the two professors as having an "illogical and conspiratorial 
approach."

         "What would motivate two recognized academics to issue a 
compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be used 
by overt anti-Semites... that will give an academic imprimatur to crass 
bigotry and... place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion 
of disloyalty to America?"
         The publication of the response paper marked the first time in the 
Kennedy School's history that it has allowed faculty from other schools at 
Harvard to answer back directly to the work of any of its professors.

       Since the paper was published several other well-known authors have 
condemned or disagreed with it, including David Gergen in US News and 
World Report and Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com. The Washington Post 
reported on Sunday that while well-known Israel critic Noam Chomsky 
applauded the two professors for their courage in writing the paper, he 
felt they took a naive view of US foreign policy.
       University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, a vocal critic of 
the war in Iraq, said the men were "incredibly bold" for trying to start 
the debate. But he also said "he does not believe Jewish neocons and their 
Christian supporters forced the United States into the war [as the 
Walt-Mearsheimer paper contends]," and that it was George W. Bush's 
decision alone.





       The original working paper was also strongly defended over the 
weekend. The Guardian Observer reported on Sunday that the editor of the 
London Review of Books, which was the only nonacademic publication to 
carry a shorter version of the original 81-page report, defended her 
decision to carry the report, and also said the charges of anti-Semitism 
were ridiculous. Editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, who is Jewish, said that while 
the support of people like David Duke was "unsettling," it did not detract 
from the debate the authors were attempting to start.

         'I don't want David Duke to endorse the article,' [she] told The 
Observer from France on Friday. 'It makes me feel uncomfortable. But when 
I re-read the piece, I did not see anything that I felt should not have 
been said. Maybe it is because I am Jewish, but I think I am very alert to 
anti-Semitism. And I do not think that criticising US foreign policy, or 
Israel's way of going about influencing it, is anti-Semitic. I just don't 
see it.'
       Ms. Wilmers also said that those making the charges of anti-Semitism 
may actually encourage it in the long run.
         'It serves a purpose. No one wants to be thought of as 
anti-Semitic because it is thought of as worse than anything else, 
although it is not worse being anti-Semitic than being anti-black or 
Islamophobic. Really, one of the most upsetting things is the way it can 
contribute to anti-Semitism in the long run just by making so many 
constant appeals and preventing useful criticism of Israel. No one can say 
Israel's posture does not contribute to anti-Semitism, yet charges of 
anti-Semitism are used to justify that policy.'
       The Financial Times also carried two pieces over the past week in 
support of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper. On Sunday, the paper editorialized 
that in the US, "Reflexes that ordinarily spring automatically to the 
defence of open debate and free enquiry shut down - at least among much of 
America's political elite - once the subject turns to Israel, and above 
all the pro-Israel lobby's role in shaping US foreign policy." The Times 
also said that the Walt-Mearsheimer paper is not truly being considered, 
but "swept aside by a wave of condemnation."
         Honest and informed debate is the foundation of freedom and 
progress and a precondition of sound policy. It is, to say the least, odd 
when dissent in such a central area of policy is forced offshore or 
reduced to the status of samizdat. Some of Israel's loudest cheerleaders, 
moreover, are often divorced by their extremism from the mainstream of 
American Jewish opinion and the vigorous debate that takes place inside 
Israel. As Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, remarked in 
Haaretz about the Walt-Mearsheimer controversy: "It would in fact serve 
Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were 
exported over there [the US]."Nothing, moreover, is more damaging to US 
interests than the inability to have a proper debate about the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how Washington should use its influence to 
resolve it, and how best America can advance freedom and stability in the 
region as a whole. Bullying Americans into a consensus on Israeli policy 
is bad for Israel and makes it impossible for America to articulate its 
own national interest.
       The other piece on the controversy the Financial Times carried was 
from Mark Marzower, professor of history at Columbia University, who wrote 
Monday in an opinion piece called, "When vigilance undermines freedom of 
speech," that what is striking about the whole debate is not so much the 
content of their report but how "discussing the US-Israel special 
relationship still remains taboo in the US media mainstream." Prof. 
Marzower writes that is seems that it is all but impossible "to have a 
sensible public discussion in the US today about the country's 
relationship with Israel."
         If fear of being tarred as an anti-Semite - and there is no more 
toxic charge in American politics - blocks the way, what anti-Semitism 
actually implies in today's America is increasingly unclear. Over the past 
century, secularization, wealth and prestige have bolstered the place of 
American Jewry in national life. Polls suggest that seriously anti-Semitic 
views are now found only among a small minority of Americans. Yet, fear of 
anti-Semitism has not vanished. Where once it was suspected - and often 
found - in the workplace and the domestic political arena, it is now 
expressed in terms of sensitivity towards criticism of the Jewish state. 
Often ambivalent about the methods of lobby groups such as the American 
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), American Jews generally share the 
committee's ultimate goal of maintaining a high level of US support for 
Israel. As Earl Raab, the veteran commentator, has noted, there is a sense 
that if America abandons Israel, it also may be in some way abandoning 
American Jewry itself. In the process, the line between anti-semitism and 
criticism of Israeli policy has become blurred. Defending what Bernard 
Rosenblatt, the distinguished interwar Zionist, predicted would be "the 
Little America in the East" is seen by many as synonymous with defending 
Jews as a whole.
       Marzower also wrote that there is no reason that the relationship 
between Israel and the US should not be subject to the same kind of 
cost-benefit analysis as any other any other relationship the US has with 
another country.

       In perhaps the most balanced view of the debate about the working 
paper and the response to it, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an English journalist 
and author whose books include "The Controversy of Zion" which won a 
National Jewish Book Award, writes that "the American reaction is puzzling 
to Europeans," and he says is another example of the great transatlantic 
rift.
         On the eastern side of the Atlantic, it has long been recognized 
that there is an intimate connection between the United States and Israel, 
in which Aipac clearly plays a major role. The degree to which this has 
affected American policy, up to and including the war in Iraq, has been 
discussed calmly by sane British commentators - though also, to be sure, 
played up maliciously by bigots.
         In America, by contrast, there has been an unmistakable tendency 
to shy away from this subject. As Michael Kinsley wrote in Slate in the 
autumn of 2002, both supporters and opponents of the coming war did not 
want to invoke classic anti-Semitic images of cabals, arcane conspiracies, 
and malign courtiers whispering into the prince's ear. Such motives are 
honorable, and yet there is always a danger when something is wilfully 
ignored. As Kinsley said, the connection between the invasion of Iraq and 
Israeli interests had become "the proverbial elephant in the room. 
Everybody sees it, no one mentions it." Until now, at any rate.

       Mr. Wheatcroft also wrote that no one needed Walt and Mearsheimer to 
point out the work being done by Israeli lobbyists because they are happy 
to point it out themselves, especially on the website of Aipac, which 
"proudly quotes Bill Clinton's description of Aipac as 'stunningly 
effective' and John McCain's praise of its 'instrumental and absolutely 
vital role' in protecting the interest of Israel. Perhaps Mearsheimer and 
Walt would have done better to confine themselves to that website as their 
source." And ultimately, he says, the key question in the entire debate 
is, Has the relationship been a success on its own terms?
         When Mearsheimer and Walt ask if there are really strategic 
imperatives on the American side for ''unwavering support" of Israel, that 
is at least worth discussing as a hypothesis. But it's scarcely more 
fascinating than the question of whether such support has been to the 
long-term benefit of Israel.
         Bolstered by American aid, successive Israeli governments tried to 
strengthen their settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza, the policy [New 
York Times columnist Tom] Friedman calls insane. Ariel Sharon at last gave 
up the dream of a Greater Israel, including his promise to remain in Gaza 
''for Zionist reasons." And now Ehud Olmert, when he has formed his new 
government, will withdraw from most of the West Bank. Might not much blood 
and treasure have been saved if Israel had been obliged to make those 
choices years ago?


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